Thank you so much for joining. I am Andrew Reich, Vice President of Business Development at Zixi. I’m joined by Michael Rebel. Michael, thanks for joining. We’d love for you to introduce yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. And my name is Michael Rebel. I’m a Senior Solutions Architect, Broadcast Specialist within AWS, our Media Entertainment, Games and Sports Division. And happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. And Michael, you know, you feel like you’re a staple at NAB, IBC, you know, you’re frequently seen a lot at the AWS booths, usually building a demo and sharing with customers and partners about all the cool things that AWS are doing in the Media Entertainment space. So we’d love to hear some of the things that you’re showcasing at this IBC. Yeah, absolutely. First off. Yeah, definitely at AWS and being there and being lucky enough to have a good core group of us. I get to build all the booths for NAB, IBC, some of the SVG, like working together as a team specifically in broadcast has been excellent. AWS really has a good, strong team of broadcast specialists and those who’ve been in the industry for a very long time. Generally, most of us have been in the industry for 15 to 20 plus years. So it’s been amazing. This year it’s been great. I mean, every year we come up with something new, trying to push boundaries of running broadcast within AWS, but not just to build things, just to build things. Like we want to build things that are solving problems that we’re seeing people in the broadcast space or the live cloud production space that seem to see that or think that there is a problem to run it in the cloud. So we always want to make sure that what experience they see on prem, we can also do in the cloud and better. So we always really try to pinpoint, you know, demos that solve problems and streamline the process and, and basically demystify running broadcast in the cloud, I guess is the best way to put it. And this year, if we start with just like within the broadcast side of it. So we’ll start with one, the Master Control Global Distribution, which thank you Zixi for supporting and also being part of that demo. With that this year, what we’ve really kind of focused on not so much of the traditional playout and master control, I feel like we’ve shown that that’s a known commodity. People run playout in the cloud all the time now, master control. We really wanted to focus on solving global distribution, management of large amount or large volume of live linear feeds and streams in the cloud and how you manage them, how you monetize them, how you localize them for global distribution and how you actually do global distribution without satellite. In North America right now, satellite replacement is really increasing a big topic now, as we all know that at least in the United States, the FCC is pulling back some more upper C band spectrum. So that’s meaning more people need to start figuring out a better way or an alternative way to distribute their live linear feeds. So terrestrial distribution, IP distribution are doing that within the cloud with us at AWS with Zixi is a perfect fit. So three things we’re showing one with Zixi, with your ZEN Master, we’ve built working directly with you, a virtual meet-me-room. And that virtual meet-me-room has got a lot of traction and a lot of people are interested in it specifically based around a more ARQ distribution. So not that you can’t DRM it, but it’s more for a primary distribution where you don’t need all the conditional access and type of encryption at DRM that you typically would see with a satellite. Nowadays, a lot of the distribution, at least in the States, Europe’s a little bit different, APAC’s a little different. It’s not always needing the full conditional access. So with ARQ protocol, like with the Zixi or SRT works really quite well. The one to many, and with your platforms made it really easy for contributors to contribute, content owners to manage and control their content then deliver globally using the AWS backbone tied in with the ZEN Master. Sometimes it’s a combination ZEN Master, even with MediaConnect. We do also build some API workflows to have media connect acts like a router. And then maybe in the future we will have things that will be more like a router, but for now it’s worked quite well. We also did highlight working with the traditional partners like CommScope and Synamedia, where it’s still running like the CommScope DigiCipher in the cloud, more cloud native deployment, but it has all that conditional access, has all that DRM and they can feed directly to the RDs that are already out there in the field. Which is great because there’s a lot of old IRDs people don’t want replace. And you can now use the cloud running say Commscope or Synamedia, the platform with their proprietary fragmented TS. It’s like HLS that then goes to a CDN with our CloudFront CDN and their IDs pool segment or fragments down from that. So it’s a great way to deliver globally for those feeds that have to have that conditional access, the blackouts. But I know that Zixi with the ZEN master, you guys are doing things around service switching, SCTE 224. So I think that’s gonna really be a big push for you guys. I see that as an awesome opportunity in the market. That I’m excited about. Awesome. No, thanks for that overview. And I think, you know, we’ve talked in the past about the importance of having a consistent, reliable stream from point a to point b. And you discussed showcasing the meet-me-room and and the concept of, you know, contribution and global distribution at your booth and and using Zixi and highlighting ZEN Master for orchestration and control plane. What are you seeing from people that stopped by? Are they also emphasizing that same importance of video contribution, distribution and orchestration and management of a lot of feeds? A hundred percent. I mean, I think that was the biggest problem. What we’re hearing and getting feedback from our customers is that having that orchestration and management layer is a big step for them because traditionally doing a point to point Unicast distribution of a large number of volume of streams gets complicated. It’s consuming. It takes a lot of manual intervention, a lot of people doing it, to manage and maintain it. So overlaying that control plane and that management layer solves the problems, makes them feel more comfortable to start moving more of their feeds into AWS, using AWS backbone to distribute and using something like the ZEN Master for that management control plane is huge. They, that, solves the problem that they were always afraid of is how are we going to manage and control thousands of streams, thousands of people. So, between ZEN Master and even our MediaConnect entitlements, allowing entitlement distribution, sharing the cost of the egress, combining all that is solving the problem. People seem to feel that that’s going to allow them to move off traditional satellite or, you know, dedicated fiber and POPs and stuff and move into a global cloud. And one thing about that’s excellent about when you start looking at like ZEN Master and AWS is all the telemetry analytics, monitoring observability that you’re getting now of your feed. You can actually now monitor by exception very easily. Even things with tag for visual confidence monitoring, even with the ZEN Master having your grid view. Even one thing everybody loves funny is the map view, especially when you’re delivering globally and seeing all the health status of all your endpoints on a global map. Visually it’s great, but also it’s great for a quick reference. Yep. Confidence. My feed’s good. It’s delivering from, you know, US East one, North Virginia region to EUS one in Dublin. And I see that feed going, you know, as color going across the map and it’s healthy as green. It’s, it gives them great confidence to feel comfortable delivering. And emphasizing that bidirectional visibility for folks in the field as well. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. And, and, know, they’re used to looking at scopes and things on prem and, you know, there are different tools and having all of this in the cloud and being able to monitor it anywhere in the world and giving even your customer at the end point access to even monitor their own feeds and self-service. That’s the way to go. It’s pretty impressive. You know, Michael, you’ve built and been part of a lot of demos and worked with a lot of technologies at a lot of different trade shows. How was the setup process with Zixi and getting the base of the feasibility of getting things coordinated and deployed? Oh, it was easy. You guys make my life easy. I mean, honestly, it was setting up a few account permissions. It’s all hosted, managed by Zixi as a managed service. So there was no real deployment for me. The main thing was, you know, getting content into, into the ZEN Master setting, setting up the end points and out points. That’s that was easy. That’s the easy part. And then you make it easy with the ZEN Master management. So yeah, it was simple. It was like one of the easiest partners we had to deal with to deploy within our global distribution demo. It was great. The hardest part of all of it, as everybody will say that does demos is getting content, getting people to give us content to use and demo at trade shows. I know you’ve been a little involved in it. And so whatever you can talk about, observations around Tam’s time addressable media store, what have you seen or noticed at the booth with Tams? Everybody’s interested in it. It’s a hot topic. It won an award at our AWS booth this year. I think it’s IAMB award this year. Actually, I’ve got a lot of questions about it. Everybody sees it solves the problem of being able to do quick turn access of content. It allows people to quick turn edit, do news production, allows a easy way to share real time content and make it available globally. Cause all those TAMs are being written directly to an S3 bucket. That bucket then can be replicated even to different regions, giving low latency access almost in real time to content directly in the region into the TAMs store. Have it, but then there’s some time when you start replicating it, but it allows quick turn of content globally. Great for news agencies for sure. So a lot of interest in it. Highlight that the ZEN Master is also now ingesting content to a TAM store. We’re showing that on our booth. So Zixi is also providing that content into the shared TAM store. I mean, Zixi and AWS has been great partners for a very long time, even way before I even joined AWS. So I think it’s growing and it’s getting better. If you’re running transport or live linear distribution within AWS, you’re using Zixi somewhere or another at some point. And that robustness of the Zixi protocol, ARQ protocols, I think the partnership’s great. I mean, we’ve really supported one another for a long time. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. Yeah. You. And I appreciate inviting me down and thanks to you and Zixi for everything you’ve done with us and supporting us with all of our demos and trade shows over the years. Absolutely. Thank you. It goes both ways.